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"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

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Friday, July 29, 2005

Stem Cell Research: Is Disease-free Perfection at Hand?

News media are reporting that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has wilted under the pressure of public opinion and will now back Federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research.

Brave-New-World liberals are excitedly confident that, with intellectuals regulating society’s morals on an ad hoc, secular basis, and now about to use stem cells to tailor-make human cells, we are on the threshold of a disease-free and perfect new species of super-humanity.

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Moral and philosophical aspects of stem cell research have been covered extensively in many other places. Let’s nonetheless reprise some aspects of the controversy.

In this review it is important to understand that stem cell research has become for liberals a new religious dogma that is part of the socialist paradigm of the world: one in which intellectuals, uniquely in history, have acquired the knowledge to restructure the political state, human society, and human nature. Moreover that these intellectuals are the first people in history to understand what the true nature of human beings ought to be, that they alone know how to solve the world’s immemorial problems.

First, human embryonic stem cell research approaches very close to the final threshold of claiming divinity for ourselves, of proclaiming not only that there is no God, but that our intellectuals are gods who can create and control life. Metaphorically it is the serpent in the Garden of Eden tempting Eve to eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge.

Many people of moderate views will say that is ridiculous. All that is in question is a technique to cure now incurable diseases.

In many ways this is to reprise the Victorian era arguments for socialism: it appeared to be simple benevolence aimed at creating a better standard of living for the poor. John Stuart Mill, in “On Liberty” and “Chapters on Socialism,” calmly anticipated the better England that would eventuate under socialism. This seemed quite innocent at the time to the public, here and in Great Britain.

Furthermore, went the argument, shouldn’t we regard socialism as the fulfillment of true Christianity? This, of course, is illogical nonsense. How can socialism, a secular, materialistic, and atheistic religion, even remotely be regarded as true Christianity, no matter what its avowed aims may be?

The dangerous weakness in the Victorian arguments for socialism, as well as present-day arguments for stem cell research, is that matters never stop where decent and well intentioned people intend them to stop.

What none of them anticipated with seemingly benign socialism was the immense, unlimited power that inherently lay in a collectivized political state without the restraints imposed by acknowledging God as our Creator and by adhering to the moral dictates of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Turning from God to the secular and materialistic religion of socialism made Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler inevitable.

We may be lucky with stem cell research. But don’t bet against the possibility that unscrupulous and power-hungry leaders in the future will take over stem cell research in the name of creating a real Master Race. After all, it is power-hungry liberal-socialists who are the most vigorous champions of stem cell research.

The possibility was anticipated in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World,” a work that depicts the “community of nations” and “international law” so ardently championed by socialist leaders like Senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. Aldous Huxley, by the way, was the grandson of Thomas Huxley, the great champion of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis in the middle 1800s.

The Wikipedia gives the following synopsis of “Brave New World”:

“Set in the “year of Our Ford 632” (i.e. the 27th century), the story describes a society whose motto is “Community, Identity, Stability”. Following the devastating Nine Years’ War (said to have begun in the 1940s), the entire planet has been united into the One World State, governed by ten “World Controllers”.

“History is forbidden, and only the World Controllers know how the present society was created and what life was like before it. The new society is built around the principles of Henry Ford, and many aspects of life reflect this. The word lord has been replaced with ford. The assembly line process is present in many aspects of life, and the symbol “T” has replaced the Christian cross, a reflection of the Model T car developed by Henry Ford. His famous phrase “History is bunk” has become the fundamental approach to studying the past - as a result, no-one knows of past societies.

“There are no families, and no-one is born in a natural way. Instead, humans are grown in factories according to industrial quotas. In this society, people are “decanted” into a chemically-enforced and totally conformist caste society. Children are engineered in fertility clinics and artificially gestated. The three lower castes are manufactured in groups of up to 96 clones, and they are chemically stunted and/or deprived of oxygen during their maturation process to control their intelligence level and physical development.”

The Wikipedia notes that Huxley’s novel was written long before the discovery of DNA and the scientific knowledge that could make it possible. In other words, the urge for political power to control and shape human society in accordance with the Furhrer’s vision is inherent in the socialist, collective paradigm. Stem cell research is just one more potential manifestation of the power urge.

Only liberals seem able to ignore that the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Mao’s Red China were equally part of their socialist paradigm. But they are proud to recognize Darwinian evolution and its first cousin, eugenics, along with stem cell research, as part of that socialist paradigm. We are told that only liberal-socialists are intelligent enough to teach in our universities. We are told that only ignorant people question the idea that everything is a product of the rational human mind alone. We are told that opposition to human embryonic stem cell research is a confession of sub-standard mental equipment.

In the liberal world view, if history and the speciated forms of life are no more than mechanical products of the interaction between random forces, then there is no barrier to the socialist political leader’s doing whatever he believes to be necessary to perfect society. What is the liquidation of a few hundred million people when they stand in the way of progress?

Abortion, eugenics, and stem cell research on live human embryos are pretty basic stuff in the liberal paradigm. If women have a right to decide whether to murder their babies, then science has a right to regulate human development and to control populations.

This urge to employ science to manipulate and to control human nature surfaced soon after the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, articulated the theory of eugenics, which asserted that political leaders have a right and responsibility to control the breeding of humans, just as farmers controlled the breeding of their animals. There were, said Galton, too many people with undesirable social and intellectual qualities. Failure to sterilize them or otherwise prevent their having children would result in mongrelization of the race. Hitler later referred to eugenics as justification for his Aryan Master Race theories and for the related Holocaust.

We know what happened with the earlier elements of the socialist paradigm in the hands of powerful political leaders. However benign and thoroughly useful its backers claim stem cell research to be, there is ample reason to fear how it might be used in the future, after society has become inured to the practice of taking apart live human embryos to create new life forms in test tubes.

Second, turning from the philosophical aspects, there is a real question whether the benefits of stem cell research, so loudly asserted by liberals as absolutely certain, will ever be realized. In that regard, read the following article posted in the May 25, 2005, edition of TechCentralStation’s website.

Many people focused on only one word in the banner headlines over news that Korean scientists have successfully cloned 11 embryos and created stem cell lines: cures. Spouses and parents of patients with diabetes, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and spinal cord damage must have felt elated that their loved ones will no longer have to suffer.

Scientists felt elated, too. The American co-author of the stunning paper in the journal Science, Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh, burbled that “in theory, this work could prove to be more significant than the discovery of vaccine or antibiotic”.[1] Even his scientific rivals stumbled over each other to congratulate the ingenuity, thoroughness and speed at which Woo-Suk Hwang and his team had worked.
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The problem is that the sick and the scientists are rejoicing over two different visions of the future. One believes that cloning embryos will soon yield life-saving cures for devastating diseases and injuries. The other knows that this kind of cloning is basically a research tool for the foreseeable future.
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In a number of countries, this news is sure to give heart to supporters of therapeutic cloning at a crucial moment. In California, US$3 billion of funding for a new Institute for Regenerative Medicine is being held up by legal, administrative and financial wrangles. But the news from Seoul will confirm Californian scientists that they are on the right track. In Australia, the Federal Government is about to review the possibility of allowing therapeutic cloning. In Germany Chancellor Gerhard Schr?der is expected to announce his support in a speech next month.
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So it’s important to get this straight now: cures from so-called therapeutic cloning are probably decades away. If ever.
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Let’s put the central issue of whether the clone is a human being to one side. Other practical and ethical issues make the Koreans’ research a non-starter. This is an opinion shared by many scientists, starting with Australia’s Alan Trounson, a world expert on embryonic stem cells who will be reviewing projects submitted to the new California institute. He told the journal Nature Medicine earlier this month that “the so-called therapeutic cloning to my mind is a non-event”. As a way of creating cures, he observed, “it’s just not realistic.” He was supported by an American expert, Jos? Cibelli, of Michigan State University, whose tip is that “I can predict that therapeutic cloning is going to be obsolete.”[2]
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What’s the problem?
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The first is an economic one: the cost of the cures. The advantage of therapeutic cloning is that it would offer a therapy which is genetically specific to the patient. The disadvantage is that the therapy cannot be used for other patients for that very reason. Unlike conventional drugs, there will be far less scope for economies of scale.
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One of the advances made by the Korean team was a ten-fold increase in efficiency. In the experiment which put them on the world map last year, they used 242 human eggs to create a single embryo. By refining their techniques they have now managed to derive cell lines with fewer than 20 human eggs. But it is unlikely that this will put therapeutic cloning remedies on the shelves of every drugstore. Since a woman treated with superovulation drugs yields only about 10 eggs, this means that one or two painful, invasive, and risky IVF cycles will still be needed for her to produce the raw material for a therapy for a single patient. [3]? Therapeutic cloning is still going to be medicine for millionaires.
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The second issue involves clinical ethics. Will it be possible to avoid exploitation of the donors, whether or not they are remunerated? Egg donation is normally safe, but there can be serious complications, including death. It is not a trivial affair.
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So the protocols to protect women donors were an important element in Woo-Suk Hwang’s experiment and one to which he gave special attention. The paper published in Science even reproduced the informed consent forms in an effort to convince other scientists that his team’s ethical standards were on a par with those of the United States.
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Unfortunately, two American bioethicists who reviewed his work in the same issue of Science gave him a D-minus for ethics. David Magnus and Mildred Cho, of Stanford University, are by no means conservatives. But they slated him for failing to describe adequately the risks to participants and for depicting donors as patients. In fact, in their opinion, a good doctor would advise women against exposing themselves to the risk of egg donation. After scrutinising the experiment and the informed consent forms, they concluded that there was abundant potential for abusive exploitation of “vulnerable patients and their friends and family members”. [4]
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In particular, they highlighted an ethical difficulty which is inherent in the whole therapeutic cloning project at the present time: that the word “therapeutic” is misleading. “It is nearly certain that the clinical benefits of the research are years or maybe decades away,” say Magnus and Cho. “This is a message that desperate families and patients will not want to hear.” [5]
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Moreover, the newspaper hype obscured the fact that Hwang’s ideal donors come from a particularly vulnerable group. He has discovered that the best clones come from freshly harvested eggs from fertile women under 30. When eggs from women in their 30s were used, one stem cell line resulted after 30 tries. Younger women produced a stem cell line after only 13 tries, on average. It’s easy to see what will result if Hwang’s work gets traction: young women selling their eggs to support their children, pay their college tuition or finance overseas holidays.?
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There’s a third factor which pushes the use of the embryonic stem cells far into the future—the safety and efficacy of these new products. As leading stem cell scientists in Britain point out in the British Medical Journal this month, “the premature use of cell therapy could put many patients at risk of viral or prion diseases unless systems are in place”.[6] They remind their colleagues of the lessons learned—and perhaps forgotten—from the premature application of gene therapy, the devastation of HIV-infected haemophiliacs, hepatitis C spread through blood transfusions and the mysterious emergence of mad cow disease. “Commercial companies are springing up around the world with all the fervour of a new ‘biological dotcom’ era, but with selective memory loss for the fact that unrealistically high expectations burst that bubble,” they write.
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A final problem is the specter of human reproductive cloning—to which nearly all voters are opposed. This taints Hwang’s success, just as it has every advance in cloning embryos.? His paper in Science piously stated that it did not provide “any encouragement for dangerous human reproductive cloning attempts. Cloned animals have adverse pregnancy outcomes, so regardless of cruel hoaxes, scientific evidence should further dispirit reckless notions regarding human reproductive cloning.” [7]
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But this is wishful thinking.
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The truth is that Hwang’s work brings the possibility of reproductive cloning just a little bit closer. And the gathering pace of therapeutic cloning is spiriting, not dispiriting, reckless notions of support for human reproductive cloning. Earlier this month Julian Savulescu, an Australian who is professor of practical ethics at Oxford University, and editor of the influential Journal of Medical Ethics, argued that cloning “will represent one of the greatest scientific advances… Cloning is power and opportunity over our destiny. Eventually artificial reproduction will become safer and more efficient than natural reproduction.” [8] There is no shortage of bioethicists who share his views.
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And not only bioethicists. James Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA, told a newspaper only a few days ago that there was nothing inherently wrong with cloning. “I’m in favour of anything that will improve the quality of an individual family’s way of life,” he said.[9]
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In fact, stem cell scientists themselves would walk on hot coals before they said the “wrong” word. For instance, the InterAcademy Panel, a global network of national science academies which includes the US National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society asserts that reproductive cloning should be banned. But it acknowledges that cloning could become safe some day and that any ban should be “should be reviewed periodically in the light of scientific and social developments”[10]. In other words, “ring us when you’ve got everything ironed out and we’ll make it ethical.”
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In short, there’s no need for us to jump on the therapeutic cloning bandwagon after Hwang’s announcement. Apart from the fundamental issue of destroying embryonic human life, there is a raft of other issues which make its success very doubtful. The main thing we have to worry about is resisting the panic of stem cell scientists who have been left in the dust by the Koreans.
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Michael Cook is the editor of BioEdge, an international email newsletter on bioethics. Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)